Invotrak: The Online Invoicing Blog

A very powerful feature of invotrak is the templating feature, which reduces the tedium in sending out the same email each time an invoice is issued. For instance, let’s look at a basic email:

Dear [Client],

Attached is the latest invoice for services rendered. This invoice is for [amount], and is due on [date]. If you have any questions, please let me know.

Thanks for your patronage,
Business Owner

It’s simple, but gets the job done. So now what? Is it really necessary to type this in every single time you issue an invoice? Nope. Not with invotrak. Just use the templates.

To set a template, go to your Settings page (click the Settings link at the top of the page), and copy the above text – or anything you want to say – into the Message Body box. While doing this, notice how I’ve put certain text inside brackets (for instance, [amount])? This is to signify a variable piece of information in this email, which changes for each invoice or client. For instance, when sending this email to Big Client, we want to say Dear Big, rather than Dear [Client First Name], which is rather cold an discourteous. Well, invotrak does this for us. In fact, you’ll notice on the right-hand side of the Settings page are a whole bunch of different bracketed-text phrases that can be included.

Wherever invotrak sees a word in brackets it recognizes, it replaces that text with the appropriate data. So, our email above becomes a customized greeting with the appropriate information for every single one of the invoices we send out. Letting invotrak handle these bits of data makes very good sense, as it:

1. Keeps us from doing these tedious entries each time we issue an invoice
2. Prevents us from making an embarrassing mistake

Next time you go to send an email, the message body will already be filled in using these templates and the appropriate variable text substitutions you’ve specified. You can then double check that invotrak got everything right before sending your email out. Simple, and effective.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.